maltesh

Based on the typical "all planets are in equatorial and circular orbits" and "My spaceccraft is capable of instantaneous impulse" assumptions, for planetary destinations, if your starting point is a 100km orbit over Kerbin the "Burn to barely escape Kerbin, followed by interplanetary transfer burn outside the SOI" costs about 75% more delta-V than a direct burn from 100kmLKO to destinations like Eve or Duna, up to more than 100% more when heading to distant destinations like Moho and Eeloo.

If your engines are higher than your center of mass, gimballing engines attempt to correct in the wrong direction. If that's the case, have you tried turning off engine gimbals before attempting to land?

If you know your orbit's semimajor axis (a), your orbit's eccentricity (e), and your radial distance from the center of the planet you're orbiting ®, you can find the true anomaly of your position on your orbit at any time (theta) with the following equation: Knowing the True Anomaly, you can then find your flight path angle (phi) which is the angle above or below the horizontal your spacecraft is travelling at that time:

I'm not sure I'd consider these particularly busy, myself. But, well, Kerbal Alarm Clock + base-and-station building results in fairly well-stocked orbits.

Basically, treat the L as an abbreviation for "Liquid Volume Units," rather than liters. They aren't hard-tied to any measurement at this point, so just use them as a guideline for building your tanks. If your tank appears to have twice the internal volume of the Rockomax X200-16, not many will complain if you give it twice the fuel capacity.

An engine will run on fuel through a docking port in certain positions. My typical tanker uses an engine attached to the tank by a docking port to do the last bit of boosting to get to orbit, and I decouple the engine while the trajectory is still subortital to drop the booster engine in the atmosphere. And the transfer stage on this rover sucks the fuel out of the rover's tanks first, through the docking port and into the transfer stage, so I have to refill the tanks from the transfer stage if I want to use the lander engines. That said, you're right in that the arcane and sometimes confusing rules of fuel crossfeed are in effect with the Kethane converter and Fuel/Oxidizer. Just as you say, if an engine can't pull fuel through it, the kethane converter can't push fuel through it.

I imagine Scott Manley uses some kind of version control setup to constantly keep backups of his saves so that he can go to the old backups and copy/paste objects inadvertently destroyed by mishap, or completely restore his saves to an earlier version should that be necessary. KSP doesn't include that ability by default, however.

One of the weird things about Mechjeb 2 (or it's been weird since I've been using it), is that if you just type in coordinates into the Landing Autopilot, it will generally fail to land, either by not completing its burns, or by failing to bring itself down properly. On the other hand, if you click on the "Select Landing Target From the Map Screen" button, and click anywhere on the planet you want to land on to set a target landing zone, and /then/ type in the coordinates, it generally works fine.

If you're landing things landercan-sized or larger, though, for Mun-class destinations and heavier, the extra delta-v on the lander from using LV-Ns as landing engines tends to be worth it. Doubly so, if you're using a wasteful landing procedure, or planning to check multiple locations out, or are simply going to leave the lander in orbit for the next mission to refuel and use. The more efficient the engines, the less fuel that the next mission has to brung to put in the lander when it gets there. And it's not like you have to fly the lander to the distant planet on the same spacecraft you're sending the Kerbals on. I've been using something similar the Side-attatch-point-clipthrough method posted upthread on the various landers I've been testing and using. overall, it works fairly well. Some examples: On Moho On Vall On the Mun The tankage on all three are significantly larger than they need to get to the surface and get back to orbit, but I figured I'd rather have a soft fluffy cushion than a knucklebiter.

No, it isn't. It just means that he hasn't left the Kerbin sphere of influence yet. As you can see on the screenshot, he took it only 14 minutes after launch. A bit of time acceleration, and the orange line would turn blue.

It's not that difficult to build them that way. Just start with the probe brain, and use either six-way nodes, or radial attatchment points to place the rover's "body" at right angles to the primary axis. Care needs to be taken when using the six-way node with fuel tanks, though. They do allow fuel crossfeed, and if you don't place them the correct way, they'll leave you unbalanced if your spacecraft burns the fuel in the rover. And of course, there aren't any clues on the six-way nodes themselves to let you know which node is the "Top" and which one's the bottom. Or are you referring to rovers more like this? That one uses a radial attatchment point atop the center fuel tank to mount a probe-brain for proper orientation when landing wheel-side down. Admittedly I have not yet taken either design interplanetary, though plans are in the works for that.

Um... Almost every lander anyone has ever made is a VTOL lander. "Vertical Take-Off And Landing" is pretty much standard for putting things on moons and planets in KSP.

If your spacecraft has enough delta-V to get itself into a circular orbit around the Mun, it has enough delta-V to reach Duna if you depart during a launch window. Duna-intercept-course from LKO is about 200 m/s more delta-V than a Mun-intercept course. As far as what I'm doing with Kethane, I've set up mining stations over the Mun and Minmus, but they've been basically just practice: Learning how to deal with mining and transporting Kethane, and getting it into orbit. The real targets are places like Ike, Pol, Bop, Dres, and Eeloo, where shipping fuel to a station from Kerbin will take months or years.

The OP also appears to be using an upside-down tricoupler to attempt to connect three engines onto the bottom node that's being counted on to support the entire lander on liftoff. If that's what he's doing, it's probably a significant reason for the unbalanced forces that are requiring so many struts to have a chance at lifting.

When you're orbiting off-rails, your orbit is recalculated every timestep. Small differences in the position of your spacecraft's root pod as you go around the planet result in the observed differences of your periapsis and apoapsis altitudes. When you're orbiting at 1x, or under physwarp, the projected orbit is a decent approximation of the course you're going to take, but your ship isn't stapled to that course unless you're orbiting at 5x or faster.

Making use of the B-9 and Firespitter cockpits: Fuel-carrying variant of the passenger rover in the above image: Kinda view this one as more of a relocatable habitation station than a rover, as the current design iteration doesn't have the power generation for significant-range travel.

Require the racers to start their cars held off the ground by launch clamps?

This is probably the mod I'm manually using the most often, as it's completely revolutionized the way I play, and I'd like to thank you for it. One request for alarms: Could you possibly add a "Closest Approach to Targeted Object" preset and "Restore targeting on switch to vessel" option?

4500 is definitely within the realm of possibility. The following is a graph of velocity at reaching Moho orbit. The horizontal axis is distance from the sun in millions of kilometers, the vertical axis is velocity in kilometers per second. Click the image to go to the Desmos Graph, and its calculations. The orange curve is the sun-relative velocity of Moho as a function of its distance from the sun. The blue curve is the periapsis velocity of a transfer orbit from Kerbin's distance as a function of periapsis distance. The green curve is the difference between Moho's velocity and the Transfer Periapsis velocity. The red curve is the relative arrival velocity at Moho, taking into account Moho's eccentricity (though not its inclination.) For a perfect hohmann to Moho periapsis, given the simplifying assumptions, arrival relative velocity is about 2.4 km/s. For a Hohmann to apoapsis, arrival relative velocity is about 3.7 km/s. The arrival relative velocity peaks at about 4.45 km/s, at a distance from the sun of about 5.3 million kilometers, slightly further from the sun than Moho's semimajor axis (5.26 million kilometers, represented by the black vertical line.) And of course, Moho's relative inclination would crank that arrival velocity higher, as well as if the player cut inside Moho's orbit to catch up to it.

Quick Desmos Graph showing the difference in delta-V when transferring from a circular orbit around the sun to a circular orbit destination using a Hohmann Transfer (Green Curve) and an infinite-distance bi-elliptic transfer (Orange curve). Vertical lines and bands show the semimajor axes of the various worlds in the Kerbin system, as well as the periapsis and apoapsis ranges for worlds whose orbital eccentricities > 0.1 Click the image to visit the Desmos Graph. Horizonta axis is in millions of kilometers of distance from the center of the sun, vertical axis is km/s of delta-V. As the graph shows, given the above simplifying assumptions, the bi-elliptic beats the Hohmann if your circular-orbit destination has a radius of less than about 1.14 million kilometers, or greater than about 163 million kilometers.

Here's a travelogue of a trip to Duna I took back in early 0.18. Yes, there's a Mechjeb on the interplanetary stage. However , Mechjeb can't make your spacecraft do anything it's not capable of. The interplanetary stage is actually a bit of overkill for Duna: As per the album, there was enough delta-V left to return to Kerbin after spending less than 24 hours on the Dunar surface. https://plus.google.com/photos/117586430260877805957/albums/5831825488966285105

You list Eve Liftoff/Land at 1,200 m/s delta-v. That's very high for landing (because the atmosphere will do a lot of slowing for you) and very low for liftoff (because the atmosphere will do a lot of slowing against you). Eve also has the highest planetary surface gravity in the game.

If the other flight is not within 2.5 km, mining and refining will stop.

You don't mention where your spacecraft currently is in the original post. For clarity's sake, you aren't currently in Duna's sphere of influence, are you?

Alternatively, use the synodic period formula. If T1 is the longer of the periods in the target/destination pair, and T2 is the shorter, the synodic period between Hohmann windows is equal to (T1*T2)/(T1-T2)